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Friday, September 13, 2013

Fiction: Voyager

I wrote the following bit of fiction after reading about the Voyager 1 probe leaving our solar system, I'd love to know what you think of it, even if it's really bad (which it might well be, I've never written anything sci-fi-ish). Cheers.

A picture of Voyager 1, courtesy of www.space.com

“Let’s start
with a question: which single person is responsible for the greatest number of
human deaths in our recorded history? Here’s a little clue, in case you’ve been
asleep for the past few years: it’s not any of the first few names you’re
thinking of. Hitler? Too obvious. Pol Pot? Ditto. None of those depraved
motherfuckers managed to rack up as many corpses as this guy. Worst thing? Dude
wasn’t even trying to be a killer, he was just an explorer.”

Ian’s
finished, and he’s looking at me for an answer, his usual smug grin spread
across his face. He knows I don’t know, and he loves it.

I shrug, “Man,
you know history ain’t my thing, it could be Elvis Presley and I wouldn’t have
heard. It’s got to be whoever you’re holding responsible for all this though.”
I wave a hand in the direction of the armoured glass window separating us from
the outside world. Earth, and that’s about all that’s left out there now.
Barren and scorched, there’s nothing left of the lush, green world I grew up
in. Everything’s grey now. At least it makes camouflage easy.

The grin
gets wider as Ian soaks up this tiny victory, uses the feeling to nourish his
soul for a moment. “Sorry man, trick question. No-one even knows the guy’s name.
Whoever signed the order to go ahead with the old Voyager program. Death
warrant for humankind that one, not that he ever could have known. Or she.
Could have been a woman. Not sure NASA was much into the equality struggle in
the sixties though. Leave that to the hippies I guess.”

So it’s
going to be a Voyager day. Great. Ian’s favourite. I’ve heard it all before,
more times than I can remember. Still, if it keeps the conversation away from
some of the other great debates (Slayer or Metallica, Android or iOS) I’m not
about to complain. Not that it would make a difference whether I complain or
not; Ian is a great talker, but listening isn’t a strong suit.

“Anyway,
mister or missus NASA signs the papers and Voyager is go. The scientists and
engineers beaver away for a while and in ’77 the thing’s ready to be flung out
into the abyss. Past Saturn and Jupiter, sending us the digital postcards as it
goes. That big red spot on Jupiter? A storm big enough to envelope Earth, made
of superhot gasses. I tell you man, that film Twister? Would have been a lot
shorter if they’d been chasing that storm! But photos of Jupiter and Saturn
were just the starters for Voyager, it’d been built to last, and the NASA boys
wanted it to keep on going. So they aimed it at the edge of the solar system
and away it went.”

I’ve got
pretty good at looking like I’m interested in what Ian’s saying, when I’m
actually keeping an eye on the monitors for any hostile movements outside, so
these history lessons really just wash over me now. That’s good, as they tend
to last a while. I don’t have anywhere better to be right now, or ever, and most
of the time the background hum of Ian talking is preferable to the background
hum of the micronuclear generator keeping this place going.

“It’s sort
of funny when you think about it, some people worried about the gold disc on
Voyager being an invitation to any megalomaniac aliens to come and get scrappy
with us, in the end it wasn’t what we had to say that mattered, it was where we
were saying it.”

He’s stopped
talking, and is staring at the semi-automatic rifle he has in his hands. Before
all this happened, he’d have loved to get his hands on something like that. Ian
had been one of those guys who really enjoyed a bit of simulated war. Airsoft,
paintball, Call of Duty online with a battalion of other players who were well
off enough to know damn well they’d never be called upon to look down the
barrel of a gun that fired something more real than a plastic pellet, thimbleful
of paint or a collection of visually accurate pixels. Until now. And that same
semi-automatic weapon, the pinnacle of human design, full of carbon composites
and Computer Aided Death, suddenly looked like bringing a knife to a gunfight
once the BHLs showed up.

That’s
Beyond Heliosphere Lifeforms, by the way. Named after the theoretical limits of
the Sun, our sun’s, influence on
space. Once you’re out of the heliosphere, you’re really in outer space. You can
also stop worrying whether you’ve applied suncream. A tan is the least of your
worries though, because it turns out there’s a whole lot of other intelligent
life in the galaxy, and they’re mostly just as capable of being nasty fuckers
as we are.

The only
reason we didn’t hear from the BHLs before is because of Interstellar Law. Any
species with the capacity for interstellar travel is forbidden from entering
another inhabited solar system, until such time as the inhabitants of that
system send something physical outside of its boundaries.

Something
like a 700kg, nuclear powered space probe called Voyager, with a gold disc attached
to it which spells out just what galactic n00bs we are.

The rest of
the universe gave us just over a year to get ready, and turned up on the same
day that those cheerful, clever bastards at NASA proudly announced to the world
that Voyager had left the solar system a year before. It was Friday the 13th
too. Typical.